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Bill Donohue: Dorothy Day, Cardinal Dolan obviously Republicans

By now you've likely seen the New York Times story by Sharon Otterman about the push to canonize Dorothy Day: "In Hero of the Catholic Left, a Conservative Cardinal Sees a Saint." We might discuss the pros and cons (mostly cons, I think) of telling this story this way, lining up the players on either side of a left/right divide. I will say that I think the article is most interesting when it steps outside that framework and visits Maryhouse to talk to Martha Hennessy, Day's granddaughter, and then St. Joseph House for a discussion with volunteers. The Catholic Worker context of those last few paragraphs makes the struggle over Day's place in Catholic culture wars seem as petty as it is.

What I really want to talk about, though, is this paragraph, speculating about what might be motivating Cardinal Timothy Dolan to support Day's cause:

"It is an opportunity for him to demonstrate that conservative Catholics are not uncaring, without accepting liberal principles in how you service the poor," said William A. Donohue, president of the Catholic League, a conservative antidefamation organization. "She was not, like many liberal Catholics today, a welfare state enthusiast."

When the bishops won't speak to the NYT, who will speak for the bishops? Our friend Bill Donohue stands ready as always to step into the breach. Take note, all those who get offended when anyone suggests that the U.S. bishops' recent forays into public-policy discussions have been self-defeatingly partisan. It is true that most (though not all) of the more vocal U.S. bishops try to avoid sounding overtly partisan when they speak to political issues. Donohue has no such compunctions. Which is just one reason the bishops ought to be concerned about allowing him to position himself as their surrogate in the media.

We've been over this before, and whenever Donohue comes in for criticism, someone will surely say, "I think there's a real need for what he does, but...." By "what he does" I believe such people mean the "antidefamation" work of the Catholic League -- protesting insults to and attacks on the Catholic faith and people. I actually would not agree, but let's set that aside. Is that, in fact, what Donohue does? Is it the principal work of the Catholic League? I don't think so. Yes, Donohue occasionally finds a legitimate insult to get worked up about. But for the most part, he is a public figure who engages in conservative Catholic identity politics for fun and profit.

We looked once before at the Catholic League's Twitter account, which at that time was largely dedicated to cataloging mentions of gay people (or things gay people might enjoy) in the New York Times. During the height of election season it was dedicated to promoting the cause of Mitt Romney and griping about the successes of Barack Obama -- for example, after the second presidential debate, offering this helpful suggestion: "Maybe they can find a male moderator with a pulse or a female one who isn't an ego-driven partisan." (My favorite election-season tweet was the one where Bill Donohue learned about the Electoral College: "California, 1/50th of the states, has 20% of all the electoral votes. Romney may very well win the popular vote and still lose." You don't say!) And recently, Donohue was convinced that a joke made by Jamie Foxx about how conservatives caricature liberals is actually proof that the caricature is accurate (they DO worship Obama!).

None of this activity can be said in any way to defend the "civil rights" of Catholics. And when Donohue does turn his attention to Catholic matters, it is often to defend the faith against the bad influences of his coreligionists on the left. (Remember this?) The fact that he calls Catholics he doesn't like "anti-Catholic" suggests that he may not be the best person to head up a legitimate antidefamation effort.

So let's just agree that protesting legitimate offenses to Catholicism is a very small part of what Donohue does as head of the Catholic League, and that he devotes most of his time and energy to being a would-be surrogate for the conservative cause. The funny thing is, Donohue is not a very good surrogate, for either Republicans or Catholic bishops. He's sloppy, he wanders off-message, he makes ridiculous mistakes. That time he took a swing at Obama supporter Hilary Rosen and ended up insulting adoptive parents, the RNC's communications director issued an embarrassed disavowal of Donohue's remarks. (Donohue sulked: "RNC is a joke anyway.") And his recap of the latest USCCB meeting follows the usual template -- "Bishops Reject Left-Wing Agenda" -- but look at what he thinks happened: "A vaguely worded document on the poor, which was not distributed to the bishops until they arrived at the meeting, was shot down." Yeah, nice try, left-wingers! This is not the take of a man who is privy to inside information. This is the take of a man who couldn't be bothered to follow even the publicly available information about the meeting.

So, I doubt that what Donohue had to say in the NYT about Dorothy Day and the "welfare state" -- which boils down to "Cardinal Dolan wants to use her to look like he cares about the poor but cares more about Republican priorities" -- came directly from the Cardinal's mouth. But Donohue always talks as if he knows the minds of the bishops, and they allow it -- not just by refusing to speak for themselves, but by embracing Donohue and conveying legitimacy on his enterprise. As Eugene Carraher noted in his essay "Morbid Symptoms," Donohue's recent book Why Catholicism Matters boasted glowing endorsements from four prominent American bishops, with Cardinal Dolan leading the pack. "[T]he church, and Dr. Donohue himself," Dolan says, "give an emphatic YES! to all that is good, noble, and uplifting in the human person."

Are we talking about the same Dr. Donohue? The one who made a video of himself brandishing an Obama figurine in a jar of feces? (Skip ahead to 3:35 -- and don't worry, the poop was fake!)

Seriously, your excellencies and eminences: what will it take to make you rethink the wisdom of encouraging Bill Donohue to act as your public interpreter?

Comments

Its fair to say that if Dorothy Day were alive today, she would find todays Catholic liberals the enemy of the poor and the dispossessed. Another reason to loathe Twitter; it allows people to make pronouncements, but doesn't give them enough characters to back them up.

John Prior:I think that there are some people who enjoy being outraged. They take some kind of psychic pleasure from it. (There's got to be a psychological term for it.) Both Bill Donohue and Rush Limbaugh have that personality characteristic.

Thanks, Helen, I think you're right. He'd probably do it for free.We could make up a psychological term for it, just for fun. Tickled Rage? POed Pleasure Disorder (PPD)?Iracundia hilaris? Wutfreude? Or maybe an eponymous and honorific Donohue Syndrome, although he's hardly the first case?The matter needs further study.

So:A bunch of conservative bishops, who have asked pro-life politicians to refrain from receiving communion, are championing the cause of a woman who had an abortion and a child out of wedlock because, according to Bill Donohue, who decried the refusal of the Empire State Building to light up in honor of Mother Teresa as a violation of Catholic civil rights, says that Day, who ran the Catholic Worker operations along Christian anarchist lines, was anti-welfare state.It's a great day to be a Catholic!

Bill Donohue is Cardinal Dolan's James McMaster, the abrasive editor of the 19th century New York Freeman's Journal. It was never quite clear when or if McMaster was speaking out in the name of Archbishop John Hughes when he went on the attack.

In Hicksville in March, Cdl. Dolan spoke of the best thing we [bishops] ever did having been to hire an attractive, articulate, intelligent woman to speak on their behalf against abortion (NYT 3/4/12). Perhaps, if persuasively reminded of that statement, Dolan would throw his weight around in Manhattan enough to bring her back with a broader agenda on behalf of the Catholic League, a lay, public face who could do more to counter defamation than to encourage it, as Donahue often seems to do.

My sense is that Dorothy Day saw needs and felt a personal call to respond, and the Church sustained her in that calling (though some individual bishops didn't; I think one story goes that she moved her operations into another diocese when a bishop complained that she was serving a lot of scandalous people). She was a leftist who got sick of the kind of arguing over fine points as if they were cataclysmic issues of cosmic import that becomes an end in itself in some leftist and feminist circles. She became apolitical in a sense, though she was deeply concerned about political events. She also wasn't above calling up Eleanor Roosevelt to sic her on some racial injustices when FDR was prez. Reducing her story into some sort of morality fable about how good-hearted individuals should be out helping the poor without government "interference" (i.e., help) would be to trivialize the many ways she devoted herself to social justice and non-violence. One longs for Patrick Jordon, Commonweal alum, who worked with Day and the Catholic Worker newspaper, to weigh in on how the bishops and Donohue are spinning her story.

"But for the most part, he is a public figure who engages in conservative Catholic identity politics"What evidence do we have that Cardinal Dolan thinks that this is not an effective strategy for furthering Catholic interests in the public sphere or in any way disadvantageous for the Church in America?

Eric -- We have had then-Abp. Dolan's enthusiastic praise of Bill Donohue posted on his blog on 12/16/10: "Why we need the Catholic League". A bit strangely, he quoted denouncements by others of Donohue such as blowhard, a self-appointed censor, right wing publicity mill, a bully,and American Taliban before he got to the "Keep at it, Bill! We need you!", which was his main message. Responding commenters split strongly pro and con. http://blog.archny.org/?p=931

Calling out Catholic bashers is important certainly as important as the dog whistles the mainstream (left-leaning) media folks routinely hear. I do not catch him often, but I usually like hearing what Donahue has to say. I admire his dedication and I enjoy his intensity, enthusiasm and wit.Raymond Arroyo sometimes has him on his news program ('The World Over Live"; EWTN).

Dorothy Day is reported to have said: "Don't call me a saint. I don't want to be dismissed so easily."Unfortunately she was all too correct. "St Dorothy" is emerging as a one-dimensional figure, recruited as an ally in our inta-religious controversies.As I remember Dorothy Day she had four unswerving commitment: (1) The Catholic Church, its doctrines, its practices, its traditions, its leadership. (That didn't stop her from criticizing the actions of her contemporary Catholics for failing to be faithful to these doctrines and traditions.) she was a "traditional" Catholic in the fullest sense of that term.(2) Anarchism: she refused to recognize the moral legitimacy of the modern nation-state. Her ideal was a semi-medieval community composed of associations, organizations, neighbors, etc running their own affairs on a regional level.(3) A deep abiding skepticism toward capitalism. While she rejected Marxism, she retained the the Marxist moral critique of capitalism. Indeed her anarchism might be seen as a variation of Marx's dream of the "withering away of the state."(4) Pacifism: she never encountered a war or military conflict that she judged to be "just." She actively opposed WWI, WWII, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the expansion of the global policy of "military containment" of Communism. She urged young men to avoid conscription. And when a Catholic college (affiliated with a Benedictine abbey,) a place where she had often been a guest, instituted ROTC in the 1950s, she refused to ever again visit the place.Are we canonizing Dorothy Day in order to neutralize her critical voice? She was a thorn in the side of both "liberal" and "conservative" Catholics while she was alive. She should remain so today--even as we admire from afar her "voluntary poverty" and deep commitment to those who have been discarded by our market society.jpfarry

Jack: Right. So, I think the answer to Mollie's question ("What will it take to make you rethink the wisdom of encouraging Bill Donohue to act as your public interpreter?") is "nothing." It is pretty clear that Cardinal Dolan thinks that Donohue's tactics are needed to combat the "nasty anti-catholic canards" that seek to silence the Church in the public sphere and that identity politics is just evangelization by other means. It's all pretty sad, really.

JP Farry:Thank you... that seems right on.The bishops didn't want to be seen as voting against her so they did the usual thing... co-opting her history and and witness... the more insidious... let her be and the the icon that she is and the "sign of contradtiction" to us ALL without ecclesial trappings -- or those ridiculous tribunals judging miracles Read the ol' Kenneth Woodard book-- enlightening!!

Sorry, this has nothing to do with Donohue, Day, Dolan, or even Catholicism. Just offered as a warning against taking too seriously what you find in the press to support your cause. I refer to the recent case of the Beijing People's Daily responding rapturously to the Onion's study of Kim Jong-un, proving that the little Swiss-educated, roly-poly (too much chocolate, perhaps?) Dear Leader is the sexiest man alive, and the heart throb of million (billions?) of women.Only the snide New York Times suggests that rather than being duped, the People's Daily might have been playing its own little undercover political game. (Maybe, from his Vatican jail cell, Paolo Gabrieli was the man behind the scam). http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/28/world/asia/chinese-news-site-cites-oni...

Donohue has some more thoughts on Dorothy Day today, via the Catholic League's twitter: "It's fair to say that if Dorothy Day were alive today, she would find today's Catholic liberals the enemy of the poor and the dispossessed." Once again, bravely defending the Catholic faith from Catholics. (He's also getting a jump on World AIDS Day so that he might be the first to blame the victims.) It does make one wonder, what would he sound like if he weren't so careful to be "fair"?

The dominant Catholic Worker agenda and Dorothy's is non-violence and pacifism. Dorothy's main charism would have to be ignored if she is made a saint in these present times. Maybe in fifty -hundred years, when this Vatican generation has passed on and the world experiences a nuclear war, a look at her charism will be successful. . .

I hereby propose that NO ONE should be considered for sainthood (if that is absolutely necessary to do) until they have been dead for at least 100 years. No one would be around who knew them and the decision would have to be made on verifiable facts, not emotional cathartic ramblings of the over-the-top advocates.I.E., John Paul The Great.

Or better still, Jim, would be to leave the decision of who is with Him in heaven safely in God's hands. Okay, grandfather the saints we already have, which are more than enough to fill a liturgical calendar. But from now on, let one of the heroic virtues be anonymity.What's done now is like voting for inductees into a celestial Hall of Fame, but instead of 43 (or however many) sportswriters, there's an obscure process conducted by Vatican functionaries and others that requires an ability to judge the validity of miracles. Where does one go to acquire that evolving expertise? Is there an apprentice program? And before that even begins, there will usually be years of local (and now sometimes global) boosterism. Then too, the list of saints shows an unsurprisingly large number of founders and foundresses, clergy, and other prominent folk whose rise in the world may be due to admirable personal attributes and good connections, but not necessarily to a more genuine sanctity than millions of lesser known people live.Soon after Dorothy Day died, when the canonization talk started, someone remarked that the process was not worthy of her. I think that is still right. Let the Church continue to hold her at a loving arm's length, as it did when she lived.

Agree with Jim and John.Stop canonizations. Too silly. Too driven by money. Too dependent on the current political agenda. Edith Stein, e.g. Why? Now Dorothy Day? Fulton J. Sheen? Popes? Juan Diego??? Why? As to miracles? What about requiring the candidate for sainthood to grow a limb on an amputee? Or grow teeth in a toothless person? Or grow hair on a bald person?

I'd want to see a few constraints on that requirement for a miracle, Gerelyn. Else we might get an arm growing out of the top of someone's skull, like a leg growing where an irradiated fruit fly's antenna should be. Would a supernatural screwup still count as a miracle?

Jean, I don't see any reason to fault Twitter for Bill Donohue's excesses. About half of his tweets are links to Catholic League press releases. He has all the room he needs there, and he's no better at backing up his accusations and attacks.

I see your point, Mollie; I suppose it's no more fair to blame Twitter for the stupid things people write than it is to blame pens and paper. Just not a fan of that particular tech phenom myself. Seems more like a great big virtual graffiti wall than anything that a thinking person might want to pay attention to. But I'm old and cranky.

If the offense was Donohue asserting that Day was not a welfare state enthusiast (and, minus the cant, that's what I gather the offense is), why not offer evidence to the contrary?I mean, that way, we might actually know something after reading the thread that we didn't know before reading it.

I think it's fair to say that Day was suspicious of political movements, and was disillusioned with the left. But she certainly never made any right turns toward capitalism and never, that I can find, made any statements to the effect that political social reform was evil. She did, however, prefer to promulgate her movement, with its communitarian if not communist ideals, without government assistance or interference. Day perhaps reveals her views on government programs in writing in 1961 about Castro's revolution in Cuba. Reading what she wrote in 1961 seems naive now. But she clearly believed that Castro's literacy and anti-poverty programs were a step in the right direction. Although she was a pacifist, she said it was better for Cubans to fight than to suffer the capitalist exploitation of their country (I paraphrase). She also believed Castro was a Catholic. Here's the text of her piece: http://www.walterlippmann.com/dorothy-day.htmlFr. James Martin was also on NPR this morning talking about Dorothy Day. Given some of the anti-saint sentiment here, which I understand but don't quite agree with, I found his remarks helpful. Here's the link to the broadcast: http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&...

Not so, Mark. These guys add fame. They don't add sanctity. Dorothy Day, just for example, will always be the same remarkable woman, even without St. in front of her name. So will Teresa of Avila, Francis of Assisi, Anthony and the others in the desert, Peter, Paul, and Mary (sorry, couldn't resist), and many others. But how would we know about them? Easy. Commission someone to write a biography, if the subject didn't write one herself.

God makes the saints, not the canonizers. They merely acknowledge what God has already wrought. And, as Mollie's post points out, they may also start that hagiography mill spinning in a certain direction that distorts what really happened.The people who knew the saint are the best witnesses, and even after centuries, it's not that hard to trick out the stories that ring true and the ones that don't. One of my favorite stories is about St. Cuthbert, who, like all good northern English bishops in the 7th and 8th centuries, lived among the people. He was called to the house of a poor woman whose child was dying. Cuthbert saw he could do nothing to save the baby, but that the mother was half dead from worry and fatigue. He told her to go to bed, and that he would hold the baby and pray for it. In the morning, the baby was well. Which is a happy ending, and maybe it happened. But isn't St. Cuthbert's kindness the real miracle? I respectfully disagree with John Prior's post of 11/30/2012 - 5:08 pm; we don't need fewer saints, we need more of them. We just need fewer people like Bill Donohue diddling their stories.

JohnI would agree with you that the process is not perfect, and canonizers may not always have the best of intentions, but I can believe that canonizing someone changes them ontologically. That we do actually make saints. And whats so bad about making someone famous whos worth emulation? Do you think you would know Teresa, Francis, Linus, Cletus, Sextus and all the rest if they were not made saints? Isnt it more likely people will know and benefit from the life of Dorothy Day many years from now if the Church makes her a saint?I am not uncomfortable with a certain amount of politicking in the canonization process, nor with the saints returning the favour and politicking for us as the case may be. Sounds very commonwealish.

Very well, let the canonizations continue! (As if I had any voice in the matter. I did once think that I had a red hat around here someplace, but it turned out to be a Christmas stocking.)One question only. If Dorothy Day asked to be excused from the process for what seemed to her good and sufficient reasons, should we not grant her request?

http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/daytext.cfm?TextID=150We believe that social security legislation, now balled as a great victory for the poor and for the worker, is a great defeat for Christianity. It is an acceptance of the Idea of force and compulsion. . . . Of course, Pope Pius XI said that, when such a crisis came about, in unemployment, fire, flood, earthquake, etc., the state had to enter in and help.But we in our generation have more and more come to consider the state as bountiful Uncle Sam. "Uncle Sam will take care of it all. The race question, the labor question, the unemployment question." We will all be registered and tabulated and employed or put on a dole, and shunted from clinic to birth control clinic. "What right have people who have no work to have a baby?" How many poor Catholic mothers heard that during those grim years before the war!

Yet Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin were not content simply to write about what they believed the Catholic church has to offer the ordinary worker . . . They both believed in the importance of works. . . . Peter Maurin envisioned a twentieth-century version of the ancient notion of a hospice, a place where works of mercy were offered and acknowledged in a person-to-person fashion, as opposed to the faceless, bureaucratic procedures of the welfare state. He shared that vision with Dorothy Day.

But who is to take care of them if the government does not? That is a question in a day when all are turning to the state, and when people are asking, "Am I my brother's keeper?" Certainly we all should know that it is not the province of the government to practice the works of mercy, or go in for Insurance. Smaller bodies, decentralized groups, should be caring for all such needs.The first unit of society is the family. The family should look after its own and, In addition, as the early fathers said, "every home should have a Christ room in it, so that hospitality may be practiced." "The coat that hangs in your closet belongs to the poor." "If your brother is hungry, it is your responsibility.""When did we see Thee hungry, when did we see Thee naked?" People either plead ignorance or they say "It is none of my responsibility." But we are all members one of another, so we are obliged in conscience to help each other. The parish is the next unit, and there are local councils of the St. Vincent de Paul Society. Then there is the city, and the larger body of charitable groups. And there are the unions, where mutual aid and fraternal charity is also practiced. For those who are not Catholics there are lodges fraternal organizations, where there is a long tradition of charity. But now there is a dependence on the state. Hospitals once Catholic are subsidized by the state. Orphanages once supported by Catholic charity receive their aid from community chests.

My sainted sixth-grade teacher, Sister Mary Adelaide, would have told us dont waste your time or your peace on the likes of the William Donohues of the world. Donohue is nothing but a twisted tool, a venue, a frontman for the hierarchy to get out there in the public domain what they really think and would like to say but cant because it is too impolitic and crude. [At one time, Donohue used to have his office right inside the NY archdiocese's chancellery - Go figure!]Donohue is so convenient for the hierarchs to plant their stink bombs in the media from time to time and they then don't have to take responsibility for it while it reverberates in the media echo chamber for several news cycles. Hierarchs like Dolan get to posture for public consumption talking about saints like Dorothy Day while Donohue delivers the political talking point sucker punches about "the welfare state" for the benefit of the hierarchs friends in rightwing world.If the intrepid journalists among us on dotCommonweal want to do the church a favor, they should investigate Donohue and his connections to the hierarchy. Where does Donohue get his money to run his operation? The board for his front group, The Catholic League, is a who's who of the Catholic reactionary right-wing. Donohue will never reveal it but I would wager that the USCCB funnels money to him through one of their dummy corporations or through something untraceable.For the rest of us, the best way to give William Donohue his due is to ignore him!

I think a moratorium on "declaring" people saints might be a good thing. I'm sure there will be as many as ever around, declared or undeclared. But at least it will be less likely that they will be co-opted by interest groups to serve some agenda or other. That said, I recall some years back noticing with pleasure that in a little nook of the St. Dominic Chapel at Providence College there already was a small stained glass window featuring Dorothy Day, not labeled a saint, but an "extraordinary woman" who "loved God and Her neighbor." The nook's window, I believe, was donated by New York Alums of P.C.Here is the reasoning behind the placing of her image in the window and a link to a site showing all the windows. (You may have to scroll down a bit to find the Day window).Dorothy Day (1897-1980) This Catholic laywoman awakened the nation to the plight of the poor and downtrodden. The late John Cardinal O'Connor, Archbishop of New York said, If any woman ever loved God and her neighbor, it was Dorothy Day." Co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, Dorothy Day started her adult life as a Communist, then came to embrace a strong Catholic faith. She epitomizes the evangelical side of the Church and its concern for peace and social justice. These same concerns have always been shared by the Providence College community. As a result, the College chose to honor this extraordinary woman.http://www.providence.edu/mission-ministry/Documents/Mission%20Enhanceme...

Stuart --My brother was in a nursing home for years. There were also poor people there who could not pay for their themselves, but whose bills were paid by that "faceless bureaucracy". They received the same careful, personal attention that he did. I constantly repeat this fact and recommend the place: in 14 years not once -- not once -- did I ever did see any of the staff, not even the young orderlies, treat anyone with anything but respect and kindness.Let's be careful about insulting the faceless bureaucracy.

Sounds to me like Dorothy Day had a prejudice against government -- she even approves of help from unions, which used to be gigantic institutions, but not the government. Does she think that George Meaney changed Grandpa's bedpan? Come off it. The world is complex these days. The English village, the little New England village is over, like it or not. Get over it.Further the psychology of indirect giving is often preferable. Lord, spare us all from the Lord and Lady Bountifulss unless they are people of extradordinary tact. What I'm saying is that anonymous giving is often kinder than the face to face kind.

Stuart --Yes, I do have some disputes with Dorothy Day. I think she was in some ways a crank. That, of course, doesn't stop her from truly loving the poor and God. People, like circumstances, are complex. Terribly complex sometimes.